America: Freedom to Fascism
A documentary by Aaron Russo. Rated PG. Plays Sunday and Tuesday (January 28 and 30) at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que

TerrorStorm
A documentary by Alex Jones. Unrated. Plays next Sunday (February 4) at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que

The unanswered questions surrounding the 9/11 attacks make the assassination of John F. Kennedy look like a closed book. And if mainstream media has successfully managed to swallow the official White House version of what happened to the Twin Towers without projectile vomiting, “radical” documentarists have not. The film Loose Change 2nd Edition, for example, argues that Flight 93 couldn’t possibly have crashed where it was supposed to (no bodies, not even any blood) and might even be flying today. What’s more, it contends, whatever hit the Pentagon was almost certainly not a commercial airliner.

Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism and Alex Jones’s TerrorStorm are cut from the same anarchist cloth. In the first doc, the filmmaker pursues a number of government officials in search of the law that obliges people to pay income tax. No matter how hard he looks for the smoking gun, it remains absent while judge after judge bellows that “law” shall not be allowed in his courtroom and that the decisions of the Supreme Court offer no shelter to tax dissidents who refuse to tithe their incomes before being shown the statute that says they must.

Nevertheless, despite his Michael Moore–like persistence, because Russo is fairly neutral in terms of military matters and is seemingly indifferent to health care, old-age pensions, and the like, one can’t help wondering if his libertarianism isn’t of the right-wing variety that is primarily concerned with keeping as many dollars as possible in middle-class pockets. Sure, he slags the Federal Reserve Act and big bankers, but his constant references to The Communist Manifesto and the threat of “world government”, coupled with his uncritical adulation of his nation’s “Founding Fathers”, leave this frequently fascinating screen polemic open to a range of interpretations.

No such ambiguity arises from TerrorStorm. Radio journalist Alex Jones goes out of his way to let us know just how small the mathematical odds are of antiterrorist exercises taking place parallel to—and at the exact same time as—the London bombings that al-Qaeda is alleged to have carried out, just as his footage claims that the World Trade Center’s Building 7 almost certainly collapsed from the force of internal demolition charges, while the Twin Towers seem to have been helped along in a similar fashion. (That’s the substance of his central claim that the first blow in the so-called “war on terror” was self-inflicted with malice aforethought.) And of course, we would all like to know what happened to the $167- billion worth of gold allegedly stockpiled in the WTC’s basement.

Even if you don’t accept every claim made in these docs as holy writ—and you shouldn’t, since many are highly questionable—they do open up the debate. What’s more, their “wildest” charges are often the best documented. Overall, these films can’t help but remind us of Karl Kraus’s century-old comment on psychoanalysis: possibly only the craziest parts are true.